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The coat hooks seem pretty high but I notice that they appear to be attached to a long board with a handle at the bottom, so my guess is that you put your coat and hat on the hook then hung the board up on the post.

The name of Henry Leland is very important in the early history of American automobiles. The Cadillac Motor Co. started life as the Henry Ford Manufacturing Company in 1899, with a very young Henry Ford as the main inventor and engineer. At that stage of life, Ford was more interested in racing and testing concepts that would later be used in his cars, so he left the company and moved on to form the Ford Motor Company in 1903. Leland was left in charge of the company, and it was he who renamed it as the Cadillac Motor Co. Then he too left the company to form the Leland and Faulconer Manufacturing Co.

Leland's enduring contribution to the early development of automobiles can be seen clearly in this photo: the concept of standardized, uniform parts. Before Leland perfected the concept of standardized precision machining, all manufactured goods were made of parts that were literally hand-fitted in place, and they were not interchangeable with the same part on a different automobile. Leland took the concept of precision manufacturing from the gun factories and perfected it until all Cadillac engines, transmissions and chassis were built with standardized parts. In a very highly publicized demonstration, a pair of Cadillacs were taken apart completely, their parts were mixed, and then cars were reassembled and made to work without any failure and without having to hand-fit a single part. This feat earned the company the right to be called "The Standard of the World", a motto that it displayed proudly on its ads for years.

Another point of interest here is that the engines are being built on stationary work benches. A team of workers would put together all the parts that made a single engine, and would not intervene in the work of the other teams. This limited the flexibility of the assembly area, used up a lot of manufacturing floor space, and made for very disparate building times and manufacturing costs per unit.

A decade or so after this photo was taken, Henry Ford, forced by the increasing demand for his popular Model T car, began experimenting with the moving assembly line, and that would mark the beginning of the so-called second industrial revolution, where the division of labor and the studies of times and motions would change forever the way manufactured goods were made.

Chains go up to the windows in the ceiling to let out the hot air. Coat hooks seem awfully high, but they had to be clear of spining machines. Not a fat guy in the bunch. I can smell the old wood and the grease smell.

Shorpy.com | History in HD is a vintage photo blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.